Hello out there!

I am starting this blog for many reasons, none of which are that important to anyone but me. But just to give you a little background...

I am a 25 year old kennel technician and I work for a public animal shelter. We are currently working to transition to a "no kill" status and I believe that without the help of technology and social networking, as well as foster homes, volunteers, etc. that there is no way we will achieve our goal. With that being said, I am starting this blog as a voice for the animals I work with on a daily basis. Animals at our shelter are lucky---we do everything we can to get them adopted before resorting to euthanasia. We contact rescues and foster homes, promote the heck out of them everywhere we can. The thing is, not all of them can be saved. I'm not going to pretend that every animal who comes thru our doors is placed into a home and that isn't what this blog is going to be about. It is going to be a very real representation of what I see everyday, good, bad or ugly.

You might have noticed that I used the word euthanasia up there. Some people have a hard time with that word, and in all honesty, I am one of those. I do not and will not support euthanasia on adoptable animals unless every resource to find them a home has been totally exhausted. Even then, it makes for a bad day at the shelter. But here is the truth about euthanasia: If people outside the arena of shelter work want euthanasia to stop, they need to help us do something about it. That is a topic I plan to cover here as well throughout my blog posts.

This little chihuahua was placed in a loving home recently

I hope what I write will end up being interesting to people. I find that working at the shelter can be intensely rewarding as well as heartbreaking. I wouldn't trade it for the world though, no matter how many bad days I may experience. My goal is to post at least once per week, so there is my New Years Resolution--to do absolutely everything I can to save the lives of animals in 2012.